A Memoir Stopped Me From Slapping My Plumber

An invitation to share your experiment of one

I was not prepared for the man who showed up to fix my sink, because I hate confrontation. But in this case, something I’d read made avoiding it impossible.

I walked onto the front porch as soon as the plumber pulled up in his truck to let him in before he could knock. Knocking, of course, is the conventional and acceptable way of requesting entry into the modern-day home. For our terrier mix, however, knocking is the cue to explode the moment knuckles touch wood. We disabled the doorbell, because that was even worse. We provide therapy vouchers for people who need professional help telling the difference between a live hand-grenade and the sight of a common terrier after visiting our house.

If I’m honest, part of me feels the same way. I hate having to let strangers into the privacy of my dwelling, which makes service calls for home maintenance very uncomfortable. When someone I don’t know and don’t expect shows up at the door, I want to howl and bark too. But once you’ve used all the clean dishes in the house while delaying the repair of your dysfunctional sink, you have to open the door to a pro you don’t know.

On the other hand, it’s nice when a pro actually shows up. And you never know these days what you’re going to get. A kid who read a manual last week or a seasoned veteran. And you can always tell who the pros are. It’s the way they walk onto the playing field of their expertise, how they handle their tools, the air of confidence they carry approaching the job. So, when the plumber reached over our white picket fence for the first time, manipulated and threw the gate latch like he’d been here a hundred times before, I knew we were in good hands. If only his hands could have done his talking.

“How’s it going?” I said brightly, happy to see him at 10:40 am in the morning, because I’d been promised an arrival time of between 11 am and 1 pm and I had a business call at noon.

“I’m working,” he snapped back.

Yikes. I suddenly had a service worker on my front steps who was barking at me before we even got started.

I’ve never outgrown the primal fear I experience in the face of conflict since getting punched in the mouth in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago on a school field trip in front of the replica coal mine. I was bullied frequently growing up, and those incidents likely all had an impact. But being culled off and cornered by a small gang of inner city hoodlums who pushed an incisor through my lower lip that left me bleeding the whole bus trip home left an enduring scar—on my lip and my psyche.

I had no idea what provoked this plumber to treat a customer like a disobedient dog, but I immediately retreated into my shell and considered my strategies for minimal contact. A normal person would have told him to go back to the shop and called a different one immediately. But as I said, I’ve got a lifetime track record of getting small and invisible in the face of bullies, so I prepared to step aside.

Then I thought, “Wait a second. This is my house!”

I walked down a few steps off the porch and I said, “Seems like you’re upset about something.”

“Eleven o’clock means eleven o’clock,” he said, like I was an employee of his that had shown up late for work. Except I was paying him, and he was early.

At 10:30 I had phoned the shop and asked for an update on our plumber’s arrival time. I just wanted to know when he was coming so I could plan around it. Somehow, my request for information got passed along as a demand that I, the customer, wanted him to come right away.

“I think you got the wrong message,” I said meekly.

“How about we just get the job done,” he said angrily, now walking up the steps to go around me into the house. Contrary to my usual character, I found myself suddenly stepping in front of him.

“Hold on,” I said. “I didn’t tell anyone to send you right away. I just called to find out what time you were coming. This is a misunderstanding. I’m not in a rush and I don’t have a problem. Do you?”

I never expect confronting a bully to go well, so I was in flight mode. But to my surprise, he noticeably de-escalated his tone and curtly said, “Well, let’s just focus on the job.”

Seeing that I’d made some version of a successful boundary and that he responded, I showed him to the kitchen sink, let him set up, and told him that I’d check in before the start of my noon meeting.

I’d been quoted approximately ninety minutes of labor to remove the broken garbage disposal at issue and re-plumb the underside of the sink, but when I came back down fifty minutes later to check in, he was putting the last of his tools into the bag, wiping up the floor, and gesturing to a spotless workspace and the new shiny pipes.

“Please check my work,” he said “and make sure it’s to your satisfaction.”

That’s when it all clicked for me. I’d suffered through DIY plumbing projects and worked with enough contractors to know at first sight this work was top tier. In his sixties like me, I understood this tradesman was damn good at his craft. Probably he’d been enjoying his favorite candy bar on some side street which he’d perfectly timed to savor before arriving at 11 am sharp, like the pro that he was, at my doorstep. Feeling rushed, and as though his professionalism had been called into question before even getting a chance to demonstrate it, his pride had been tarnished.

I bent down and took a good look under the sink.

“Wow,” I said. “Looks great. Good work.”

He gave me a small, almost imperceptible, old-world bow, and said with true pride, “Always good work.”

Suddenly he was soft, contrite, and shining with pride again in his leather belt and overalls.

The remaining business of payment, preparing a handwritten invoice on a clipboard, needing to correct an error that I pointed out, and then taking the numbers off my credit card were all done in the most cordial and respectful manner. He had now fully digested the reality of the situation, retracted the misfire of his mood, and regained the footing of who he intended to be with his customers.

Earlier that morning I had run a Zoom session to onboard three new members of a memoir writing program I’ve started in my Write Hearted community.

I’d been explaining my passion for reinventing the genre of memoir. Rather than thinking of it as a stuffy, elite record of achievements that a person authors at the end of life, I want to empower memoirs that document the active discoveries of people who are just getting started with their life’s work. We’re writing memoirs that are bold claims about human potential that each author has proven possible through their experience.

After closing the community session I went back to review some of my favorite essays written by these new members. One of the essays emblazoned in my mind was “I Got a Raise for Slapping the Boss” by Dana Allen.

Here’s the first paragraph of the essay.

Mostly out of feminist outrage and, I admit, somewhat out of fear that he would try to touch me, uninvited, I turned to Mr Franklin and said, pointing to my bottom, and calling him, disrespectfully, by his first name “Jackson, do you see this? I only allow THIS to be touched by my HUSBAND and no one else. If you ever touch or pat me on my bottom…no, wait. If you even pretend to touch me there, I promise you that I will slap the shit out of you, faster than you can draw a breath. Do you understand?” With that, he laughed at me as if to say ‘silly girl’ and turned and walked away. Patricia and Susan stared at me in disbelief that I would have the guts to threaten the boss with a repercussion such as a slap. I looked at them and said “Mark my words. I will carry out my promise.

The rest of the story details how she did, indeed, carry out that promise, in a day and age where standing up for sexual harassment in the workplace was a rare phenomenon.

But here’s the thing.

It was only having just read that essay before my plumber arrived that ported some of this spirit of self-respect and dignity into my veins—over-riding my childhood bullying trauma and avoidant conditioning—and allowed me to step forward, just a little bit, and transform the experience I had with the tradesman.

This is the true power of memoir and why I started The Memoir Project.

Its focus isn’t to necessarily produce finished full-length books as literary products, but to help more humans make their highest contribution to others by being willing to talk about the biggest challenges they’ve faced.

Stories, essays, speaking and of course books can all do the job of communicating human potential to others, and the spirit of memoir is to convey that potential through what we have lived and experienced first hand as a human experiment of one. And every last person has something of value in this respect to share.

If you’re interested to learn more about this new vision for memoir writing, I’m hosting a few free Q & A sessions in the next few weeks to talk about how anyone can approach the format, whether you feel like you’ve lived enough, or written enough to even consider authoring a memoir.

Obviously, I’m very glad that I didn’t have to slap my plumber. My big win was just that I didn’t let him slap me, and I have Dana Allen to thank for it.

Here’s the full essay, I Got a Raise for Slapping the Boss.